A differential diagnosis: Samantha Power vis a vis Barack Obama

Samantha Power is a Leftist who has established a latter-day Leftist trend in foreign policy. Like most of these trends, this one reduces to reducing America. She sees American military power as a mercenary force for her preferred post-sovereign, transnational causes.

Obama is a Leftist who wears every Leftist trend as a mask over his orthodox Marxism. He imagines a world brought down to the bedrock of class struggle. He also features a strong animus toward the country in which he has come to power.

So, he has used Samantha Power’s cause as a mask to get a stick into the Middle East hornet’s nest of the cynically named “Arab Spring.”

The incursion into Libya was called a “humanitarian mission,” but it never had the design of such a mission. It was from the start an aggressive, hard military incursion, where the fossilized Qaddafi was or was not the real target (depending on the day) and the ideological composition of the “rebels” was deliberately hidden.

This was never anything but a recipe for increasing the contradictions. Power’s doctrine was a mask. It’s quite possible that no one is more confused by this than her. It’s time to deal with this distinction between a cloudy-headed Leftist who chases trends and an orthodox Marxist who is trying to re-start history according to the laws of scientific socialism.